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[woose1]

(The following is part of a AP World History assignment revolving around human rights. The objective is to help raise awareness of violations of the above mentioned rights that are currently or have recently been violated around the world, and I thought a good place to start would be the Bay12 forum and its open-minded politically active inhabitants. That said, feel free to discuss the issue as if it were any other post in General Discussion.)

"Internet censorship in China is among the most stringent in the world. The government blocks Web sites that discuss the Dalai Lama, the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters, Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement, and other Internet sites.

As revolts began to ricochet through the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, and homegrown efforts to organize protests began to circulate on the Internet, the Chinese government tightened its grip on electronic communications, and appeared to be more determined than ever to police cellphone calls, electronic messages, e-mail and access to the Internet in order to smother any hint of antigovernment sentiment.

The government’s computers intercept incoming data and compare it against an ever-changing list of banned keywords or Web sites, screening out even more information. The motive is often obvious: Since late 2010, the censors have prevented Google searches of the English word “freedom.”

In March 2011, Google accused the Chinese government of disrupting its Gmail service in the country and making it appear as if technical problems at Google — not government intervention — were to blame. At the same time, several popular virtual private-network services, or V.P.N.’s, designed to evade the government’s computerized censors, have been crippled. V.P.N.’s are popular with China’s huge expatriate community and Chinese entrepreneurs, researchers and scholars who expect to use the Internet freely.

Few analysts believe that the government will loosen controls any time soon, with events it considers politically sensitive swamping the calendar, including a turnover in the Communist Party’s top leadership in 2012."

Article here: http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/international/countriesandterritories/china/internet_censorship/index.html

Of course, the chinese government's hold on online information has been slipping recently. There are around 150,000,000 internet users in China, and it's estimated that nearly 3/10ths of them have used software widely available to 'Fanqiang', or scale the wall, such as UltraSurf. As to the projection that the system they've put in place will stay around for a while longer? That remains to be seen.

The whole censorship effort by the chinese government has been dubbed "The Golden Shield Project". Read, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall_of_China

For the lazy and/or illiterate, here's a video that summarizes the issue quite nicely: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWfUOG0EA9w (go aussies )

Discuss. What's Bay12's stance on the issue?

[Pistolero]

While it's reprehensible, I don't see them being given any alternative, given the wests historical propensity for disseminating propaganda and stirring revolts among the populaces of countries they oppose idealogically. It's a win-win for us, if they don't take measures against it they face trouble at home, if they do, we are given a powerful tool to use among our own populations.

Edit: Censorship is pretty bad all through southeast asia btw, but it never comes up. Coincidentally, most of southeast asia is further economically right than left. Optimistically I'd like to say it doesn't come up because most of those countries have much smaller populations, armies, and economies than China.

[Zrk2]

It is immoral to restrict the liberties of anyone any more than ABSOLUTELY necessary to protect others from the violation of their rights. eg: If you initiate violence any violence required to stop you is acceptable, but that violence is not acceptable if you were not endangering others.

If that makes sense.

[woose1]

Fun fact, the word 'STD' is banned in search engines, and you can be taken offline for up to a half-hour for trying to access it. That, and tiananmen square, justice, freedom of speech etc.

[612DwarfAvenue]

If you have to censor stuff like this to try and keep control, that doesn't really speak well of your ability to run the place.

[nenjin]

My stance is that we'll have China to thank for producing some of the world's most talented and practiced hackers, coming from both the private sector and the government. We're only now beginning to see what access to information and information warfare really means. Right now we're still at the "for the lulz" and "for justice" stage of hacking publicly. (And the various spammers, virus manufacturers and such.) It's going to be fun when the real professionals all go rogue for profit in the increasingly digital millennium.  When the next wave of information and internet technology hits, and there's China with probably the largest and most oppressive information control system out there.....yeah. Hello Shadowrun.

[freeformschooler]

I think North Korea is still a lot worse. But yeah, what Nenjin said. The "for the lulz" hacking tends to be hilarious but we're going to see some interesting things happening in time.

[counting]

You should buy a doll of Grass Mud Horse. Anyone who understands Chinese will know what it means when translated. (And understand why its funny, well, in a way) And if you understand what it stands for, you will know how people really do hate the GFW so much in mainland China.

Not all Chinese language users lived in China. We Taiwanese are pain in .. well, grass mud horse China.

[mainiac]

Leaving for China tomorrow.  Gonna suck.

[Glowcat]

If you have to censor stuff like this to try and keep control, that doesn't really speak well of your ability to run the place.

Personally, the way China's government attempts to stifle information and what they attempt to censor always makes me think that they are really really... pathetic. I imagine deranged men whose paranoia can reduce them to a quivering psychotic mess over the most absurd things. It reeks of weakness. At least the parts of the government who try to censor everything. It's not exactly a homogeneous bureaucracy.

[RedKing]

I'm gonna offer the counter-perspective here. I've been behind the Great Firewall. It's not nearly as pernicious as a lot of media make it out to be. Annoying? Yes. Illogical at times? Hells yes. Relatively easy to bypass? Well, you can walk into almost any Internet bar and find a dozen folks with flash drives containing proxylists and/or software to bypass the Great Firewall. It's like a rite of passage into the Internet user community there to learn how to do this.

When I was in Hangzhou I visited the local offices of Ask.com, a search engine company. My first question was, "How in the hell do you guys work on developing and testing a search engine when you're behind a restrictive firewall?" They kinda grinned awkwardly and said, "Umm....we just go around it." So even businesses regularly circumvent the authorities.

And here's the kicker: the authorities KNOW this is happening. And they're mostly okay with it. As it was explained to me, the CCP doesn't really give a shit if you're looking at pr0n, reading about Falun Gong, reading about Tiananmen, etc. It's when you start POSTING that you draw their attention. They're going after the content creators, not the consumers.

And the reason? Well, if you look at 6000 years of Chinese history, the one overarching theme you see repeated is that when the central government (be it Emperors or Premiers) loses control, instability and chaos arise. When chaos arises, *lots* of people die. You have to remember that in China, everything is amped up by a scale of 10 or more. They've had "minor uprisings" that killed more people than the Thirty Years' War did in Europe. And it's *very* difficult to maintain centralized control in a place as big and populated as China, even with a massive bureaucracy (or perhaps because of the massive bureaucracy).

As a result, it's been burned into the Chinese psyche that stability (or "harmony" as it's usually rendered) is paramount and trumps all other considerations, including personal freedoms. It's the old "Mandate of Heaven", which is itself a vicious cycle. When law and order disintegrates and rebellions abound, then you knew the ruling dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven. And how do people respond? By rebelling and defying law and order. And being a collectivist society long before Communism, personal freedom and individualism have always been placed lower than group welfare.

So the CCP does its charade with the Great Firewall, which doesn't have much day-to-day effect on people who are determined to find information, but does still allow them to shut down access to potentially incendiary websites or cover up domestic news which they don't want disseminated (like some of the government incompetence and corruption surrounding the Sichuan earthquakes a few years back).


Before I get reamed here, please realize that I'm not trying to defend the Great Firewall or siding with Beijing. But I am offering an insight into *why* it exists. It's a lot more complicated than "those damn evil Commies don't like freedom", which is how it's often presented here. Even as many Western governments look at the Chinese model and quietly try to slide towards it.   

[Azzuro]

I'm gonna offer the counter-perspective here. I've been behind the Great Firewall. It's not nearly as pernicious as a lot of media make it out to be. Annoying? Yes. Illogical at times? Hells yes. Relatively easy to bypass? Well, you can walk into almost any Internet bar and find a dozen folks with flash drives containing proxylists and/or software to bypass the Great Firewall. It's like a rite of passage into the Internet user community there to learn how to do this.

Seconding this! All my relatives in China (at least those younger) know how to get around the firewall. There are two classes of Internet users in China: those who know how to bypass government restrictions, usually younger and more IT-savvy, and those who don't/don't bother, usually the middle aged. The Chinese government does know that the former class exists, but don't exactly view the internet generation as more of a threat than external sources such as Tibetan separatists. It is the younger generation that is fueling China's economic rise, and to impose a harsh crackdown, while perfectly possible, would harm China's future prospects.

In this regard, I think that the government is easing back on cyberspace restrictions. They maintain an active interest in cyberwarfare, etc., which could be rerouted to quash internal dissent. The CCP has not actively stated its stance on "subversive" websites as yet, but I think there have been a few incidents where activist websites have been taken down through the regime's hackers.

On the morality side of things, it is misleading to term this as "against human rights". Does the overall need for a stable society outweigh an individual's right to freedom? You could argue that without stability, there would be less human rights in anarchy. Furthermore, looking at the state the rest of the "free world" is in right now, with many without their rights, it is clear to see that security over freedom is the better option.
 
Also, America is not so different. If the PRC is "1984", then the USA would be similar to "Brave New World", as one popular metaphor would put it. The government attempts to censor, but this merely slows down those who are determined to find the truth. In America, the truth is twisted to suit political aims and objectives, and few if any find it for the sake of doing so. In China, the regime brutally suppresses street protests. In America, there is no one who would listen to such protests.

P.S. If you think China is bad, you might want to look up Singapore.

[RedKing]

I'm gonna offer the counter-perspective here. I've been behind the Great Firewall. It's not nearly as pernicious as a lot of media make it out to be. Annoying? Yes. Illogical at times? Hells yes. Relatively easy to bypass? Well, you can walk into almost any Internet bar and find a dozen folks with flash drives containing proxylists and/or software to bypass the Great Firewall. It's like a rite of passage into the Internet user community there to learn how to do this.

The CCP has not actively stated its stance on "subversive" websites as yet, but I think there have been a few incidents where activist websites have been taken down through the regime's hackers.

This is an important point: there hasn't been a strong need for the state to directly intervene in the last couple of years, because of the rise of a class of young "patriotic" (i.e. nationalist) hackers, who will go out of their way to target Tibetan independence sites, news organizations who are preceived as critical of China, etc. This is one of the reasons the recent phishing scam run out of Jinan is so problematic -- it very well could have been an attack totally independent of the government. At the same time, the PLA is trying to find and recruit some of these hackers for "cyberwarfare battalions" so it really blurs the lines. I do think that part of the impetus behind recruitment is not only to harness their skills for state purposes but also to keep tabs on them and hopefully keep them from triggering an international incident.

By analogy, the last time the PRC decided to stoke up anti-Japanese propaganda for political purposes (in 2005), it got way out of hand beyond what they wanted, with it turning into outright riots in places, businesses set on fire, Japanese nationals attacked, etc. The PRC actually censored media reporting of the protests/riots and attempted to crack down on it, which placed them in a delicate position of arresting Chinese citizens for violently protesting against the Japanese, when official government narratives had been protesting the same thing only a few days earlier. This inherent contradiction is probably why they suppressed news of the riots. It's been interesting to see that they haven't broken out the anti-Japanese stick in a big way since then. Likewise, I think they want to keep the indigenous Chinese hackers at close reach to keep them from going off and committing aggressive cyberattacks against Japan or the US or whoever when Beijing wants a moderate response.

The growth of that virulent sort of nationalism among Chinese youth is what worries me a lot more than government censorship. Even Mao was supposedly dismayed by some of what the youth-driven Red Guards did in his name during the Cultural Revolution, but was too unnerved to intervene until after he had purged their leadership, lest they decide he wasn't revolutionary enough and lead a coup attempt against him. He created a monster he couldn't control, and I think the PRC is beginning to feel the same way about some of their youth today.